American Signal Red Crayfish and the European Crayfish

For the last 5 years an ugly problem has arrived from overseas, more specifically the American Signal Crayfish or Signal Cray's as they have become known to carp anglers.

Our own native variety of European Crayfish never really presented a problem to us anglers as they where too small to take large baits such as boilies and rarely would take other baits. Although they are partial to a piece of cheese it has to be said. These new visitors to our shores however are more than capable of eating the hardest and largest of carp baits.

Our own crayfish are disappearing at an astonishing rate due to their being pushed out by their larger cousins. The signals carry a parasite to which our crayfish have no defence.

These larger more aggressive foes have become a real problem to us carp anglers because once they enter your lake or river through feeder streams or some other source they will then proliferate and soon your water will be infested with many hundreds or even thousands.

The female carries many eggs through the winter time and will lay them in the spring. One female can lay hundreds of eggs and there lies the problem.

A typical adult will easily consume 20 - 30 boilies in a sitting and so where you have many crayfish the effects can be very frustrating as you receive constant bleeps from your alarms day and night making fishing for carp almost impossible. You will be constantly checking to see that you still have a bait attached.

What can be done?

Well we have a few options when carp fishing, one is to use the plastic coating which has been designed specifically to overcome their advances. This involves heat shrinking a plastic film around a boilie bait.

Another option is to fish in the margins during the day so that you can monitor your baited spot. They tend to like the slightly deeper water over gravel bars and clays patches so fishing the margins can help. The last option is to bait up so heavily that the mass of accumulated crayfish will eventually draw carp. As the carp move in the cray's move out!

Tigernuts will repel them for a while as the husk of the nut is very hard but in time they will even break these down.

There sense of smell is remarkable and so using any bait which does not have a strong aroma will help too, but of course that might not help you catch.